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View Full Version : Experimental PDA Search, Directory, and Compressing Web Proxy


humbletim
06-26-2003, 02:27 AM
Hi Guys and Gals,

I started to fool around with some ideas I had for mobile web technology, and put demos online for people to play around with. They are in no way production ready, but, seem to work well enough to start beta testing them.

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Username: beta
Password: user
Website: MobileLeap (http://mobileleap.net/mobile)
URL: http://mobileleap.net/mobile
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PDA Search Engine -- This is an indexed, searchable set of 1200+ PDA-formatted web sites from around the world. There's experimental full-page size information, including images, so you can feel better or worse before clicking on results (from costly or slow connections). I also started to enable BabelFish english translation links for sites in other languages, like Google does.

dmoz.org Mobile Directory -- I designed a few algorithms to "map" the 1200+ PDA sites into a logical structure, without having sort through them all individually. About 700 of the sites are able to be automatically categorized to dmoz.org equivalents, and maybe 80% of those actually make sense. Top/News/Newspapers/Regional is an excellent example of successful categorization.

Mobile Translation -- This is a poor man's compressing proxy server, similar to Blazer (http://www.handspring.com/software/blazer_overview.jhtml), Skweezer (http://greenlightwireless.com), or Danger (http://danger.com). It works well for finding info when you can only remember the desktop website URL. It also enables ubiquitous mobile problem solving, as you can proxy to Google or Ask Jeeves, and then utilize your existing search intuitions to find answers on random web sites. Keep in mind that with no JavaScript, DHTML, etc., many (most?) desktop websites simply will not work any better this way than when accessing them directly.

I've been testing on a real Pocket PC Phone Edition and a fake SmartPhone.

Isn't R & D fun?! Unfortunately, I need to focus on some revenue-generating tasks for a while. I'll leave the demos up as long as I can (unless server bandwidth becomes a problem), but probably won't be adding features or fixing bugs right now.

In the meantime, why not hire me?? I'm available for all sorts of research, development, programming, consulting, contract work, etc. :)

Cheers,
--Tim
tim at mobileleap.net

dean_shan
06-26-2003, 04:57 AM
I am plaining on making a mobile version of my website. Can I submit my site to be on your directory?

humbletim
06-26-2003, 06:02 AM
I am plaining on making a mobile version of my website. Can I submit my site to be on your directory?

Sure, I'd be happy to add your mobile site for indexing, just let me know the address when it's ready.

FYI: I turned off recursive link traversal (deep crawling) on my indexing bots, although if/when I get the server power to turn it back on, simply mentioning a new mobile site on any other indexed mobile site would cause it to be appear in MobileLeap search results, and also be added (somewhere) within the Directory.

--Tim
ps: don't forget to add/update your existing desktop website in the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org) :idea: